How Trump Will Hurt My Border Town

By Veronica Escobar

March 1, 2017

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CreditCreditGizem Vural

EL PASO — In 2000, George W. Bush, the governor of Texas, was elected to the presidency on a pro-border, pro-trade platform that included support for comprehensive immigration reform. Although I didn’t vote for him, I was impressed by his respect for Mexico — and I know many Latinos here in El Paso who felt the same.

In 2016, though, many of those same voters fled the Republican Party and its candidate, Donald Trump. Despite his occasional nod toward moderation, like his comment on Tuesday that he is open to a bill to grant legal status to some undocumented immigrants, voters in El Paso remain skeptical — not just because of his frequent pandering to anti-immigrant xenophobia, or his nonsensical wall, but because we know, close up, the impact that the Trump agenda could have on our economy, in El Paso and nationwide.

In the national imagination, visits to the border are like visiting a war zone, and politicians swarm to it for photo ops. Odd, then, that they don’t come to a place like El Paso. If they did, they’d get a much different story.

Contrary to the mythical border narrative, El Paso is one of the safest cities in America, with a thriving cross-border economy. (Of course, that didn’t stop the Department of Homeland Security from recently announcing that El Paso would be one of the first sites for President Trump’s border wall — nor did the fact that El Paso already has a wall.)

Politicians from both sides also like to harp on the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and cross-border trade generally, on our economy. And there’s no denying that the advent of Nafta cost Americans jobs and brought with it a host of economic and social challenges.

But again, they’d get a different story if they came to El Paso. We felt the blow swiftly and severely when manufacturing jobs left for Mexico. But El Paso adapted to make our location on the border work to our advantage — for example by building state-of-the-art shipment and distribution centers.

In El Paso alone, $90 billion in goods travels through our ports of entry annually (nationally, the value of cross-border trade is $400 billion). The El Paso-Santa Teresa, N.M., region has become the 11th-largest exporter of goods in the nation, and Mexico is Texas’ No. 1 trading partner.

Unfortunately, too few Americans understand that cross-border trade creates jobs, not just in our region and state but in the rest of the country. In fact, trade with Mexico supports nearly five million American jobs — so it’s not just the border that will lose if Mr. Trump fulfills his promises.

El Pasoans also know the cost that Mr. Trump’s policies and rhetoric will have in terms of human capital. There’s a moral case for humane immigration reform, but there’s an economic one as well. Mr. Trump has said that whatever his position on undocumented immigrants, he will preserve protections for so-called Dreamers — undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children. But his blunt talk, and the stepped-up arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, say otherwise.

These young people have pursued an education in the United States, and they’ve helped us increase our local tax base. We’ve invested in them, and they are investing in our country. Over the next decade, if Dreamers are allowed to legally work in jobs that reflect their skill level, they will raise government revenues by $2.3 billion. El Paso stands to benefit enormously, but so does every state with a large Dreamer population.

While the wall may never be built, and while many undocumented immigrants will remain — a lot depends on Mr. Trump’s wild, daily policy swings and congressional purse strings — his words are already having unmistakable economic consequences. The Mexican peso, for example, was dealt a heavy blow on election night, and its value has continued to plummet. That means that Mexicans will spend less money in El Paso and other border regions, in turn decreasing revenues and jobs in border states. Investments and the flow of commerce have also slowed significantly.

The question for many of us during the presidential election was whether communities like mine would hold 2016 general election candidates accountable. Would Hispanics in border communities reject the harmful anti-border and anti-Mexico rhetoric?

I can proudly say that El Paso did. Voter turnout in El Paso broke records — early voting and Election Day numbers soared, with a 32 percent increase in turnout, handily breaking the 2008 record locally. Hillary Clinton carried El Paso by a wider margin than Barack Obama did in 2008.

El Pasoans may have finally had enough of the misrepresentation of our people and communities and decided to create our own “border surge.” That surge helped Mrs. Clinton close the gap in Texas. In 2012, there was a 19-point spread between Mr. Obama and Mitt Romney in our state. In 2016, thanks to border communities like El Paso, it was shaved down to nine points between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump — closer than Iowa.

While many of us have grown wearily accustomed to politicians’ talk of “securing” the border, for many, this election became more about securing our identity. In the coming years, those of us who live on the border must rise above the bad policies that will hurt our communities — but more important, we must sustain and expand that sense of identity, and show our neighbors the impact their votes can have. We need to do it for El Paso, and for the country.